Artists' Books

Featured Artist: Christine Kermaire. by Rebecca Nicholls

All five of the works in our collection by Christine Kermaire appear to have arrived directly from the artist by mail. They are produced using a home colour printer, a laminator, hand riveted or glued. The books use unusual materials such as painted fabric (Flight Textile Book Two) or Tea (Expurgated). One (Euthanasia in Kit Form) is centered around a contained breath of contaminated air.

A search for Kermaire on the internet provides no results for an artists' website, or presence in a gallery context. Yet her work has made it's way by post into hundreds of libraries and special collections. Printing in editions of 300 or so, Kermaire takes full responsibility for the distribution of her work. The contained nature of the gestures proposed by her books almost suggests they are intended to remain between two people - the artist and the recipient. How many people can experience a book that is a cup of tea or a passage that involves a specific breath of air?

These books, as a sequence of objects rather than pages, are not easily read: A plan for the World War II cemetery at Ardennes is accompanied by a hand-painted textile, a note suggests collecting subjects DNA on cigarette papers and cataloging them in sequence. Yet traces of themes can be found in these works: the meeting of a scientific or historical fact with a gesture to the personal, an almost naively experimental approach to form, and elements that can be used or used up.  

There is something profoundly stubborn in these works. Resistant to conventions of aesthetic, the form of the book, and modes of collection and acquisition, Christine Kermaire delivers strange, simple, notes on her vision of humanity.